by Iris Origo
I realise, as I said at the beginning, that I have had a very varied and full life. But I am also aware, with a discomfort which increases as I get older, how much it has been a life of privilege, in all the ways which had already caused distress to my uncle Bronson Cutting some seventy years ago: unfair advantages of birth, education, money, environment, and opportunity. I must be honest and admit that some of these advantages have, at times, been highly enjoyable; but, like everything else, there is a price to be paid for them. One cannot have it all ways. These privileges have cut me off (both when I was younger and unaware of it, and now that I am, partly in consequence of the changing world around me, very well aware) from many people whom I would have liked to have as my friends, both because of the differences in our ways of life, and because of an invisible but unsurmountable barrier on their side. (It could be surmounted, of course, but at a price which I have not had the courage to pay: ‘sell all that you have and follow Me’.) I also feel very strongly, now, that over the years I could and should have made more use of my ‘privileges’, spent more of my money and used more of my energy and imagination for the relief of poverty and suffering. That I did not do so was partly due to ignorance, partly to having scattered my interests, friendships and experiments, too wide; but this is not really an excuse.
All this was brought home to me when I was working after the Florentine flood of 1966 with a small committee of people of very varied ages, professions and political opinions, in an attempt to bring a measure of relief to some of the small craftsmen and tradesmen of Florence. We all managed to work together harmoniously, in spite of these differences, and I have remained with a warm memory of these months as well as some new friends, but I fully realised how much better work was done, in the sense of forming a real contact with the people we were trying to get back upon their feet, by those of us who were not separated from them by artificial barriers of wealth and class, whose knowledge of their needs sprang from a similar (or not too widely dissimilar) way of life, and who could therefore offer real understanding, not only material help. The well-worn analogy of the camel and the needle’s eye, which in youth I had always considered unfair, then took on a real significance.
Besides, in this particular period of history, I realise that this barrier of privilege—added to that of age, which continues to exist even for those older people who most genuinely attempt to embrace the new ideologies of the young—has the effect, as Stephen Spender once remarked, of rendering one ‘almost invisible, as blacks were supposed to be in America’.
Well, there are advantages in invisibility. They give one a chance to watch more carefully the reflections upon the wall, and perhaps gradually to let one’s eyes become accustomed to ‘the sight of the upper world’. All I can relate now, is the little I have seen so far. I can only say: this, at sixty-eight, is what I have to tell.
IRIS ORIGO
La Foce, 1970
PART ONE
1
Westbrook
On a spring day in 1718, a young Englishman of twenty-three, Leonard Cutting, of Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, was sitting in a coffee-house, thinking that, in spite of his education at Eton and Cambridge, his prospects in life were ‘very low’, when a Virginia sea-captain suddenly came in, exclaiming in a loud voice, “Who’s for America?” Cutting at once rose and replied that he was. He paid for his passage by becoming a ‘Redemptioner’ (that is, by binding himself to the captain for a certain number of years of service after arrival), worked first on a plantation in Virginia and then on an estate in New Jersey, became a classical tutor in New York at what was then called King’s College and is now Columbia University; and finally, having taken orders, became the Rector of St. George’s Church in Hempstead, Long Island. He was, on the Cutting side, my first American ancestor.
My first awareness of being, not myself alone, but the last and smallest acorn of a big tree, came to me when I was very young, in my American grandmother’s house on a Sunday morning after church, when she told me to climb up on to a chair and showed me, on the front page of the family Bible, which lay open upon a tall lectern in the hall, a pattern of names—and at the end of them, in fresher ink, my own. At the same moment, the grandfather clock which stood at the other end of the wide panelled hall, and which is now in the entrance hall of my own house in Rome, began to chime; and sometimes to this day, when I come out of the Roman sunlight and climb up the cool dark staircase to the sound of the same chimes, I am taken back to that moment, and to my grandmother’s voice saying: “That’s where you come in, dear.”
Further explanations, however, proved a little confusing. After telling me that through my grandfather’s mother we descended from a cadet branch, which had settled in Flanders, of the Bayard family, rendered illustrious by the Chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, she then went back a little too far and tried to hold my interest by telling me the story of the legendary horse Bayard, presented by Charlemagne to the four sons of Aymon, who possessed the magic gift of being able to stretch himself out to carry all his four masters at once, and who may still sometimes be heard neighing on midsummer days in the forest of Ardennes. My imagination was indeed stirred, but the impression left upon my mind, and confirmed by the animal on the family crest, was that we were all descended from a magic horse.
On another occasion, I was shown the portraits of our ancestors in the well-bound, gilt-edged family history which my grandmother had caused to be compiled, but these I did not find attractive. Those stern-faced men and women in stiff white ruffs (Dutch Huguenots, as I now know, Bayards and Stuyvesants), those Scottish lairds in ruffles or stocks (Murrays and Livingstones), those white-banded, black-gowned clergymen, and, later on, those portly, prosperous merchants with whiskers and gold watch-chains, and wives with smooth bandeaux and thin lips—they all looked to me very strange, formidable and dull. Like most of the self-appointed little aristocracy of ‘Old New York’, my grandparents came, on both sides, of good respectable middle-class stock, which, as Edith Wharton was to observe about her own relatives, ‘does not often produce eagles’. If I felt a slight interest in any of my grandfather’s more remote kin, it was perhaps in Robert Livingstone of Roxburghshire, who, having set sail for the New World in 1673 and settled in Albany, at the time when New Amsterdam was being handed over by Holland to the English and renamed New York, changed his crest from Si je puis to Spero meliora, and purchased from the Indians some 2,000 acres on the East bank of the Hudson, on payment of 300 guilders, plus some paint, a few blankets, coats, shirts and stockings, six guns and gunpowder, and a small assortment of axes, tobacco, and pipes, three kegs of rum, and one barrel of strong beer—a transaction to which he later on referred as ‘vast charges and expenses’. He then obtained from the Governor of New York the right to call this land ‘A Lordship or Manor’, acquired the rights of patronage over any churches built there, and subsequently increased his estate to such effect that by 1714 it consisted of more than 160,000 acres, of which he sold 6,000 to the government for the resettlement of some 3,000 German refugees (called ‘Palatines’), whose lands at home had been invaded by the French, providing them for six months with wine and beer. He also, on behalf of the British government, took part in ‘the suppression of piracy’, fitting out for this purpose a privateer called the Adventure, appointing to its command Captain William Kidd. Soon after, however, news reached the government that Kidd himself had embarked upon the same career, and he was eventually tried at the Old Bailey, found guilty of murder and piracy, and hanged at Execution Dock on May 23, 1701. Kidd’s defence—that the ships he had attacked were sailing under the French flag—was ignored, he had no proper counsel for his defence, and it is clear that he did not have a fair trial. “Livingstone,” we are told, “felt the matter keenly.”
I also feel a mild curiosity about some of my Bayard ancestors, in particular a somewhat formidable lady, Mrs. Samuel Bayard of Amsterdam, who, having been left a widow in her youth, set off in 1647 with four small children
for the New World. She was described as being ‘of imposing appearance, highly educated, alert in business and imperious in manner’—and she also apparently had a strong sense of justice, since it was through her intercession with her brother Peter Stuyvesant, the governor of New Amsterdam, that a Quaker, Robert Hodgson, was freed from imprisonment on account of his faith. Her son, too, Colonel Nicholas Bayard, seems to have been a man of some independence of spirit, since he incurred a sentence of imprisonment in 1664 for sponsoring a petition pleading for freedom of religion and exemption from bearing arms against the Dutch, and also, some thirty years later, narrowly escaped being executed for High Treason as ‘a leader of sedition’ and a Jacobite. But his chief interest for me lies in his marriage in 1668 to the only one of my American ancestors whose story I should really like to know, a young woman called Judith Verleth, whose life before her marriage is described in a single sentence: ‘She was imprisoned in 1662 as a witch by the Puritans of Hartford.’ How had the accusation come about, I used to wonder; how had she escaped death, how had Colonel Bayard come to marry her? Her only other appearance in our family records is some years later, when her husband had bought an estate on the west side of the Bowery, close to a hill then called Bayard’s Mount and later on Bunkers Hill. She was then seen walking down Broadway on a fine spring morning on her way to church, wearing ‘a head-dress of rows of muslin stuffed with wire’, a dress of purple and gold ‘cut away to show her black velvet petticoat with silver orrices’, green silk stockings and fine embroidered shoes. ‘Her hair was powdered and her handkerchief scented with rose-water.’ I should still like to know more about this lady.
* * *
Back—back—how far back should one go? My own inheritance is an extremely mixed one, since, in addition to the English, French, Dutch, and Scottish blood on my American side, I can lay claim to both an Anglo-Irish, a purely English, and a Scottish strain through my mother, Lady Sybil Cuffe, who was married in London to William Bayard Cutting Jr.—then the private secretary of the American Ambassador to England, Joseph Choate—on April 19, 1901.
When the young couple first announced their intention of becoming engaged, my English grandfather, Lord Desart—always reluctant to intrude upon another person’s privacy, even that of his own children, and inclined to believe that everyone else was as serenely ruled by reason as he was himself—felt obliged to ask his daughter whether she had weighed all the consequences of changing her nationality and living in a foreign country. Being much in love and never having seen anything of the world beyond her own family circle, she naturally answered that she had.
Twenty-two years later, when I told my grandfather that I, in my turn, was engaged to an Italian, Antonio Origo, he asked me, with equal tentativeness, the same question, and received a similar reply.
Both my mother and I, in our sincere but totally uninformed replies, gave not a moment’s thought to the persons whom our decision would affect most closely: our future children.
As far as I am concerned, the consequent double strain in my inheritance has undoubtedly enriched my life; but it was also responsible for a sense of rootlessness and insecurity during my youth. Extremely adaptable on the surface (though this was largely misleading), I found no difficulty in ‘fitting in’, as I passed from my mother’s Tuscan villa at Fiesole to the country house on Long Island which was my American home or to Desart Court in County Kilkenny. Indeed the trouble was that—up to a point—I fitted in so completely, was so conscious of the distinctive flavour of each house and its inhabitants, that whenever a change had to be made, the uprooting was followed by a re-adjustment of my manners and, to some extent, of my values. It was not only a question of leaving a familiar place and people I had come to love, but of becoming each time, as one was moved on, a slightly different person. Even a child could then hardly fail to ask herself, “But which, then, is me?”
And now, in my children—of even more mixed blood, since to the American and Anglo-Irish strain on my side has been added an Italian-Russian-Spanish inheritance from their Italian father (who had a Russian grandmother, Paolina Polyectoff, on one side, and a grandfather of Spanish descent, Paolo Tarsis, on the other)—I see the pattern repeated or rather the small piece of the pattern that is known to me. Should I try, I wonder, to find out more? Some part of my family history I have, of course, been told. Turning to my mother’s side of the family, I know that my Anglo-Irish grandfather’s house in Ireland, Desart Court, came to him through his ancestor, Joseph Cuffe, who served in Ireland under Cromwell and was awarded some lands in County Kilkenny which were called Cuffe’s Desert. I know too that the ancestry of my grandfather’s mother (who was Lady Elizabeth Campbell, daughter of the first Earl of Cawdor) goes back to Lady Mary Bruce, the sister of Robert Bruce, King of Scotland—thus providing an admirable excuse for edifying us, as children, with the story of Bruce and the Spider, though we were not then told about the more recent and less creditable incident of the massacre of Glencoe (for these ancestors, alas, were the ‘Black Campbells’ of Breadalbane). We can also claim kinship, I believe, with various Plantagenets, while on the side of my English grandmother, Lady Margaret Lascelles—whose parents were the 4th Earl of Harewood and a daughter of the Marquess of Clanricarde—the Clanricarde ancestry goes back to Ulick Bourke, Lord Clanricarde, whose wife Honora was the daughter of Connor O’Brien, one of the legendary kings of Ireland. Clearly, however, I lack a genealogical mind, for—even at my present age, when many people, perhaps because they expect fairly soon to leave this world, develop an interest in their kinsmen who left it long ago—I find it difficult to feel much concern for these traditions, except perhaps in our connection with ‘great-aunt Harriet Ganricarde’, who married a great-grandson of Stafford Canning, and thus transmitted to me an agreeable possession: an exquisitely set necklace, brooch and earrings, known as ‘the Canning emeralds’, which I have now handed on to my eldest daughter. In general, though, I feel no more personal connection with the people mentioned in the ‘ancestral tablets’ so carefully compiled by my mother’s sister, Joan Verney, than with any other name read in a history book—perhaps because I know so little about them, that they have remained nothing more than names. But I do feel (and already felt in childhood) a great interest in the life of my four grandparents on both sides of the Atlantic, whom I both knew and loved, and a wish to set down what I have learned about them, and this wish has been strengthened by realising that the life they led has already become as irrevocably remote, as completely a ‘period piece’, as if they had lived many centuries ago. I will try to set down, in the first two chapters of this book, what has been told me about it, and what I myself remember.
* * *
The family Bible in which my name was inscribed lay in the hall of my American grandparents’ house, Westbrook, on the South Shore of Long Island, beside the river named Connetquot, from the Indian tribe which had lived on its banks in the seventeenth century. It was there that my grandparents, with much imagination and enterprise, had transformed a spit of sandy, mosquito-haunted land and marsh into a wild garden and park of great beauty, and had built, in 1886, the house which became their home. Although constructed in the period in which the monumental country houses of their friends were still rising in Newport along Ocean Drive, it had the great merit of not attempting to be either a French chateau, an Elizabethan manor-house or a Florentine villa; its material was the unpretentious indigenous shingle, and its design that of an English cottage, if a somewhat overgrown one. Any architectural infelicities, however, such as gabled windows and an occasional turret, were soon softened by the luxuriant creepers on the walls and by the planting of shrubs and trees, and indoors the house certainly had a remarkable degree of Victorian spaciousness and comfort: large rooms cool in summer and glowing with heat in winter, a panelled library filled not only with the well-bound sets of an orthodox ‘gentleman’s library’, but also with first editions of Stevenson, Conrad, and Oscar Wilde; a dining-room and breakfast-room in whic
h the old English silver was as fine as the Canton and Lowestoft china, and upstairs, in the bedrooms, every device to enhance a guest’s comfort that the imagination could conceive. A ‘play-room’ in an annexe, joined to the main buildings by a wide arch, provided a billiard table and ping-pong table, and even, in my father’s time, a small electric organ, and, on the edge of the lawn, a wide ‘piazza’—enclosed in a wire netting like a meat-safe against the ferocious Long Island mosquitoes (which both the inhabitants of the North and the South Shore declared to be far worse on the other side of the island)—looked out over a velvety expanse of green, shaded by a few great trees, to the wide river flowing down to the Great South Bay. It was here, out of doors, that the real charm of Westbrook began, with the tall English oaks beside the house, the shrubs and ferns bordering the mossy paths that led into the woods, and the three ponds edged with tall trees and shrubs which reflected, in the autumn, the brilliant reds and pinks of swamp maple and dogwood, and in the spring, massed banks of azaleas and hybrid rhododendrons. Best of all, to my mind, was the shaded, winding path along the river’s brink, leading to the stretch of natural, unplanted woodland and marsh, where one might see a sudden flight of startled wild fowl and smell the faint acrid odour of rotting leaves and fallen boughs, and watch the still, melancholy expanse of water turn to copper in the sunset light.
